Many Internet search engine services (for example Google or Yahoo!) allow users to search the Internet for information. A searcher typically enters a search query including a number of search terms, and the search engine returns a list of web pages that it has identified, which may contain relevant information. The search results are usually listed in a ranked order, with the results considered most relevant placed at the top of the list. For many search queries, the list of search results is large, and can only be displayed over many pages of search results.
Consumers often search the Internet for products or services they wish to purchase. These include CDs, DVDs, computers, cameras, airline tickets, hotels, and many, many other goods and services. Indeed, for every product or service offered over the Internet, there may be potential consumers searching for it.
There is a strong incentive for a goods or services vendor to have their web page displayed at or near the top of the list, or at least on the first page of search results. To accommodate this, search engine services therefore allow vendors to pay to have advertisements for their products displayed in response to search queries entered into a search engine. These paid advertisements are often listed in a separate part of the search results list, and may be specified as “sponsored links” or by a similar name.
A vendor who wishes to make use of this service provides the search engine service with an advertisement and search terms associated with the advertisement. When a search query is processed by the search engine, the search engine service identifies and displays the advertisements whose search terms most closely match the search query. When the advertisement is displayed, the searcher can click on the advertisement to follow a link to a “landing page,” usually the home page of the vendor's website.
As an example, if a search query consists of the search terms “hotel” and “Lisbon”, then hotel service providers who can offer hotels in Lisbon will want to display their advertisements. The hotel service provider could then submit an advertisement, associated with the search terms “hotel” and “Lisbon”, to the search engine service. The advertisement would be linked to the vendor's website.
Generally, search engine services charge for these paid advertisements on a “per click” basis, and vendors will not want to be paying to attract searchers who are not interested in purchasing their goods or services. Accordingly, there is a need to target the search terms associated with the advertisement; for the example of a hotel service provider who only provides hotels in Lisbon, they will not want their advertisement to be displayed every time the search term “hotel” is entered, but only when more relevant search terms are also entered (for example, “Portugal” or “Lisbon”). They can also reduce wasted clicks by providing more information in their advertisements.
Many vendors have extensive ranges of products. Travel, retail and classified websites may stock an enormous range of products. Typically, these websites will have more than one thousand (or even more than a million) different inventory items. Furthermore, each inventory item or category may be associated with multiple search terms. Each advertisement will then need to be submitted for display through several different search engines, each of which may have a different required format. Clearly then, the management of these advertisements can be a very large task. The problem is exacerbated for products with short life cycles or variable price or availability. Accordingly, advertisers are often limited in the number of items they advertise and how they display the advertisements, simply because of the high labour cost involved in creating and maintaining the advertisements. Advertisers therefore often only advertise the most popular 2 to 10 percent of their products, and miss out on specifically advertising the other 90 to 98 percent of niche products.
It is accordingly an object of the present invention to make it easier to manage these advertisements.